Storm forces two campuses to unite
Kids at Kingwood split schedule with Summer Creek
Dee Julian hustled through her storm-ravaged classroom at Kingwood High School, grabbing volumes off shelves and tossing them into a bright green plastic bin.
Kingwood teachers had been given only 45 minutes on Friday to retrieve what they needed and decide what could remain behind.
“Beowulf.” In. “Brave New World.” In. “Hamlet.” In.
A bound set of the Western canon stacked on the floor? That could stay for now.
The artwork from former students? Those were coming with her.
The most important items? “My books and my highlighters for the kids,” said the English teacher of
21 years.
Two weeks earlier, her room had been carefully set up for the start of the school. Then Hurricane Harvey dumped torrential rains on Houston; floodwaters swamped half of Kingwood, and stormwater rose to the second floor of the high school. Now Room 2302 was in tatters. The carpet soaked and danksmelling. The drywall shredded. Blue walls ripped away, exposing steel beams. The collected works of Shakespeare, a gift from a student, water-stained and warped.
Julian worked quickly, packing tote bags and boxes with staplers and butcher paper.
On Monday, there would be a new classroom, in a new school, with a new schedule — as the entire Kingwood High student body and staff move into Summer Creek High School for the year.
The arrangement, in which Summer Creek students will attend class in the morning and Kingwood students in the afternoon, is what one Humble ISD administrator called the “best of the worst plans.”
The shared campus strategy presents a daunting logistical challenge as school officials must coordinate5,013 students ,427 teachers, 104 buses and dozens of clubs and extracurricular groups. When the plan was announced, some parents immediately raised questions and concerns about instructional time and equity, though many have rallied with calls for support and cooperation.
Two vastly different campuses and student populations will be brought together when the school year begins.
Kingwood High is 76 percent white, less than 5 percent economically disadvantaged and graded “A” by Children at Risk. Summer Creek is 82 percent black and Latino, 48 percent economically disadvantaged and rated “D.”
“OK, I think that’s it,” Julian said, taking a last look around. “Goodbye, beautiful classroom.”
The decision to merge the two schools, which sit about 12 miles apart on opposite ends of West Lake Houston Parkway, came quickly.
After Humble ISD superintendent Elizabeth Fagen toured the school on Aug. 30, the extent of the damage to the Kingwood building became clear. It could take up to a year to finish repairs to the structure, leaving it unusable.
That evening, Fagen convened a “transition team,” a group of 23 administrators, and gave them 48 hours to devise a solution.
The team, led by Assistant Superintendent Trey Kraemer, considered a wild assortment of options, from dissolving Kingwood and dispersing its students to middle schools, to using church facilities or portable buildings.
One by one, the ideas didn’t measure up. The middle school plan would disrupt too many students. No church facilities were large enough to accommodate Kingwood’s 2,782 students. Portables were not available. Three of the district’s high school campuses were already at capacity or overcrowded.
That left Summer Creek, which has 2,231 students, in a 325,000-square-foot building — about 1,000 under capacity.
Summer Creek students will go to class from 7-11:19 a.m., while Kingwood meets from 12:11 to 4:30 p.m.
“In any normal day, we would never consider that as a solution,” said Kraemer, who was Summer Creek’s founding principal.
This proposal would allow students, who were supposed to start class on Aug. 28, to go back to school on Sept. 11, and it would keep Kingwood students together — one of the transition team’s priorities.
“Parents were seeing that their children had been through a lot,” said Fagen. “They just wanted to preserve that sense of community for their students.”
Still, some Kingwood parents worry about the longer distance and bus transportation to Summer Creek, which may take 30 to 45 minutes on roads often crowded during rush hour. Others wonder how school rituals such as homecoming, prom and pep rallies will be preserved when King wood students are just visitors on someone else’s campus.
“It’s not the ideal situation by any means,” said Rhonda Smith, whose daughter, Kaitlyn, is an incoming King wood High freshman. “But we have to make it work. The kids need normalcy. They need a physical place to go.”
Summer Creek parents are especially concerned about the academicimpact of cutting hours. Under the adopted schedule, students at the shared campus will receive 240 minutes of instructional time a day, enough to meet TEA requirements but far below other high schools in the district.
At a special board meeting Sept. 5, one Summer Creek parent after another raised objections:
This plan treats their children like experiments. The loss of teaching time will hurt students who are already struggling. Half-days will leave the children of working parents without supervision. This plan felt foisted upon a school that is mostly black and brown. The division of the two student bodies raised the specter of “separate but equal.”
“They are not putting children’s education first, said Melanie Smith, whose son, Daniel, will be a freshman at Summer Creek. “I don’t think this is a recipe for success.”
School officials say that online learning, additional homework and off-site tutorials will help compensate for lost class time. But Smith, who has worked as a teacher in both the Humble and Houston school districts, is not convinced.
Like other Summer Creek parents, Smith stressed that the concernsdon’ t ne gate her compassion for the Kingwood students, many of whom have lost homes as well as a school.
“We understand that this is a crisis,” she said. “We welcome them with open arms.”
Even as debates and some heated discussions surfaced, so did calls for unity.
Summer Creek cheerleaders prepared goodie bags to present to their Kingwood counterparts. Student organizations and clubs posted pictures of welcome signs. Hashtags such as #weareone and #twoschoolsbecomeone were tacked on Twitter messages.
Summer Creek students decorated the school’s central hallway, a quarter-mile-long stretch nicknamed “Main Street,” with posters declaring “one love,” dubbing the school “Kingcreek” and mashing the mascots’ names — the Kingwood Mustangs and the Summer Creek Bulldogs — as the “Bullstangs.”
The student leaders of each school sent out letters of encouragement.
From Ingrid Piña, Kingwood’s senior class president: “The truth is our senior year will be one for the record books. But it has a chance to be extraordinary — showing just how strong Kingwood Mustangs are in the face of adversity .… To the seniors of Summer Creek, thank you for opening your campus and arms.”
From Sydney Caston, Summer Creek’s senior class president: “At first, when I found about what was happening, I was ‘shook,’ but then I thought to myself: ‘We’ve got to make the best of this situation at hand. For myself personally I am more than happy to have the Mustangs at our school.’ ”
When the girls met for the first time last week, they hugged like old friends.
As did the teachers being introduced to their “roommates” — the colleagues they will share a room with for the next year.
Summer Creek staff cleared shelves and made room for books and personal photos. Kingwood teachers tried not to intrude on their host’s space.
Someone left plastic bins filled with beads, buttons and other supplies as a gift for Kingwood High special ed teachers, who lost all their custom-made materials and medical equipment in the flood.
And in true teacher fashion, they all talked about the learning opportunity for the students.
“What an amazing opportunity to show kids leadership,” said James Gaylord, a Summer Creek architecture teacher who wore a T-shirt that read “The Creek is Rising.” “What an opportunity to collaborate. It’s incredible.”
Kingwood principal Ted Landry was also looking ahead. Once students settle into a routine, he believes the nerves, apprehension and anxiety will ease.
“We know what we are up against. We know we need to get started and get the kids back in school,” said Landry. “We are so grateful to Summer Creek. Without them, we wouldn’t exist.”
At an open house on Saturday, giant letters in the front of the Summer Creek building spelled out: “WELCOME K HS MUSTANG S .”
Inside, King wood families wandered the gleaming halls, looking for lockers, picking up schedules and searching for classrooms. Students also left messages, on turquoise, orange and lemon Post it notes stuck to locke rs, for their Summer Creek peers:
“Thank you so much for sacrificing your school for us. We appreciate you.”
“Stangs + Bulldogs. Strong together.” “2 schools. 1 Community.” “You rock.”